Harry Palmer Fan-art

Exclusive to the Deighton Dossier: Q&A with Len Deighton, including info on including the never-filmed Horse Under Water.

h/t Permission to Kill

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Fury a la McGinniss

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Emma Peel

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Archer

Dear Internet,

I should have been told about this sooner. I had to learn of this ... on television!

Archer is an animated, half-hour comedy set at the International Secret Intelligence Service (ISIS), a spy agency where espionage and global crises are merely opportunities for its highly trained employees to confuse, undermine, betray and royally screw each other. The series features the voices of
H. Jon Benjamin as suave master spy "Sterling Archer," whose less-than-masculine code name is "Duchess"; Jessica Walter as his domineering mother and boss, "Malory"; Aisha Tyler as his ex-girlfriend, "Agent Lana Kane"; George Coe as his aging-but-loyal butler, "Woodhouse"; Chris Parnell as ISIS comptroller and Lana's new love interest, "Cyril Figgis"; and Judy Greer as Malory's lovesick secretary, "Cheryl."

Links

ARCHER Official Website | Only on FX

FXArcher's YouTube Channel

From Egypt with Love

Is the the S.P.H.I.N.X. secret headquarters? Maybe it was a plan for covert peacekeepers developed by Anwar Sadat that eventually got him assassinated. I don't know because I can't read the writing, but whatever it is, it looks really cool.

Cold Warriors

Tip o' the hat to I'm Learning to Share! for pointing this loyal reader in the direction of If I Only Had A ... where I found a link to download Hoyt Curtin - Incidental Music from. And if you dig that whole sixties spy-fi genre vibe, check out a series of forty-one photos of actual gadgets used by secret agents.

Spy-Fi

A couple of items of interest for those who share my fascination with sixties spy-fi. First, some nice Robert McGinnis prints are available at RMG-Artwork. Unfortunately, they are currently limited to only James Bond stuff, but hopefully that will changes.

h/t CommanderBond.Net

Second, Greg Hatcher at CBR (Comic Book Resources) posted a good piece on men's comfort culture. He focuses on Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm and the works of John D. MacDonald.

Read "Friday Nestled Under an Old Quilt (Comfort Zone, part 2)"

Cthonic Bastard out of Carolina

What makes this video worser than worse is that while watching it, I can smell the snow crab legs my wife is eating in the other room.

Cool Spy Gadgets
Here...

Bikinis & Berettas

As anyone who has ever looked at my sidebar can attest, I've been a fan of Kevin Dart's work for quite some time. In addition to doing everything from illustrating 20,000 Leagues under The Sea to doing promo art for a No Doubt tour, Dart has created a series of posters for movies-that-never-were (but damn well should have been). Movies like Cannibal Girls of The Forbidden Island, The Secret Agent Girls of Danger Cove, and The Deadly Bikini Girls of Shark Island. The prize flower of Dart's garden, however, is Yuki 7, a sultry Japanese superspy who makes Erin Esurance look like Velma from Scooby Doo. According to Dart's posters, Yuki was played by Kimiko Suzuki in such films as To Catch A Temptress, Danger Is A Female, and Roman Rendezvous.

To promote the release of Seductive Espionage: The World of Yuki 7, Dart recruited young French creative director Stephane Coedel to animate his graphics into a theatrical trailer for the 1964 Yuki 7 movie A Kiss From Tokyo. Coedel's animation really does Dart's work justice. The grain is perfect. The action, especially the old school car chase, is great. And Cyrille Marchesseau has the whole John Barry/Lailo Schrifin/Hoyt Curtin vibe down-pat. The video perfectly captures Kevin's retro spy-fi.

"A Kiss From Tokyo" Theatrical trailer from Stephane coedel on Vimeo.

Catcher, Lawyer, Soldier, Spy

h/t robotnik

In addition playing major league ball for the Cleveland Indians, the Washington Senators, and the Sox (both Red and White), Berg graduated from Columbia Law School, studied Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, and Sanskrit, served as an OSS agent during WW2 where he had a major role in the U.S.'s decision to back Tito over other resistance leaders and the opportunity to terminate physicist Werner Heisenberg. "Terminate ... with extreme prejudice." All of Berg's adventures can be read about at J*Grit: The Internet Index of Tough Jews.



Casey Stengall called Morris "Moe" Berg "the strangest man in baseball." But, what if he had been even Stranger?

The good folks over at Mighty God King Dot Com have an interesting take on Berg, locking him in battle with J. Edgar Hoover Himself for American occult supremacy.

Homeland Security

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

U.S. Secret Service agents perform a security sweep on Ukrainian cultural performers before Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko and U.S. President George W. Bush arrive at St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kiev, April 1, 2008.

h/t Feral Jundi

Magazine. TIME Magazine
To mark the centenary of Ian Fleming and the theatrical release of Quantum of Solace, TIME takes a look at the World of Bond: the bad guys, the booze, the broads, and more.

Saturdays on Wednesday

h/t Chris Roberson

Anyone who has been following the keystrokes made by this particular monkey knows that I, like my first-born, am a great fan of The Secret Saturdays. Therefore, they would understand my delight when I saw an imagined The Secret Saturdays comic book cover done a la Jack Kirby (thanks to the brilliant mimickry of Juan Ortiz).

She Blinded Me With Super-science

As part of his series on "Secret Services," Chris Roberson today discussed several special organizations from comic-dom: Section Zero from Image Comics, Amalgam's "What-If" portmanteau Challengers of the Fantastic, and John Byrnes's Danger Unlimited. For anyone who enjoys superscientific spy-fi as much as I do, I highly recommend dropping by Mr. Roberson's neighborhood frequently. In that, past he has written about everything from the BPRD to the Diogenes Club, and, most recently, has commented that Section Zero inspired his own work.